dispute with the media
“Then another company will get the account”: Musk wants to keep US broadcasters on Twitter with blackmail
For weeks, Elon Musk’s Twitter has been in a public bickering with the mainstream media. Some have therefore stopped using the service. Now Musk is putting the pressure on.
It’s an attack with a call. Elon Musk announced when he took over Twitter that he wanted to create “a platform for global freedom of speech” and democratize the media. Since then, the tech billionaire has repeatedly attacked established newspapers and television stations. Now the conflict has reached a new high: Musk threatened that if NPR’s radio stations didn’t start tweeting again, the syndicate would lose its account.
In a series of emails to NPR reporter Bobby Allyn, the Twitter owner finally escalated the dispute that had been smoldering for weeks. “Will NPR start posting again now or should we sign over @npr to another company?” Musk wrote out of nowhere. The broadcaster hadn’t tweeted for a few weeks after an ongoing conflict with Musk. And that didn’t seem to fit.
Suddenly changed policy
In fact, the short message service reserves the right to close accounts if they are “inactive”. According to the user guidelines, this is the case if you do not log in for 30 days. According to the guidelines, you don’t have to post anything yourself. When asked about this, Musk Alley refused to answer. And just kept threatening.
“Our guideline is that we recycle account names if they are definitely not used,” he repeated his attempt to put pressure on the broadcaster. “The same guideline applies to everyone. No special treatment for NPR.”
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Musk versus the media
The threat is just the latest stage in an ongoing dispute between Musk and the radio station. NPR, which stands for National Public Radio, is a network of public radio stations. Unlike the vast majority of the media landscape in the USA, the broadcaster is not profit-oriented, but pursues a similar purpose as public broadcasting in Germany. Funding comes from donations and merchandise income. Part of the donations come from the government.
This also led to a conflict with Musk in the spring. The Twitter boss had introduced a label for media that were “state-controlled”. In this way, users should be able to recognize when reporting is being controlled by government agencies and is being used for propaganda. Also NPR and the TV equivalent PBS or the British BBC had received the mark. NPR then began a public discussion with Musk because the broadcasters work completely independently editorially, i.e. are not state-controlled by definition. After a public debate with Alley, Musk initially seemed to see his misunderstanding. Only to change the station’s label to “state-financed” a short time later. On April 12, NPR then drew the line – and announced that it would no longer use Twitter as a medium.
The episode is just a small snippet of Musk’s ongoing battle against mainstream media. Musk, who keeps spreading conspiracy theories and extreme opinions, is rather hostile to the traditional media. In his mind, an open media platform like Twitter could replace them as a source of information. But that has not worked so well in the first six months of his leadership (read more here). Musk still thinks he’s right. There was too much censorship on Twitter, he explains his decision in a recent interview with talk show host Bill Maher. “We have to defend free speech. That’s especially important when we disagree with someone. Otherwise it’s easy.”